Ambition Page 8

  “That way will take too long, sir. If possible, I’d like to be serving my country on active duty again as soon as tomorrow.”

  “Formal procedures take time, Commodore.”

  “Which is why I thought that with Your Excellency’s assistance …”

  The gleam in Admiral Cubresly’s eyes grew sharper.

  “Reserve Commodore Fork, there seems to be something you don’t understand. I am authorized to ensure procedures are followed, not to break the rules. I’ve heard rumors about you on several occasions. They say you’ve got a tendency to give yourself special treatment, and from where I stand, it’s hard to say you’re completely recovered yet.”

  Fork’s features went rigid, and his skin—pale to begin with—went practically white as a sheet.

  “First, you need to start by following the procedures prescribed. Unless you do that, you won’t be able to get along with the other men even if you do come back. That would be bad for you and bad for those around you. I’m telling you this for your own good. Try again, and make a fresh start.”

  Cubresly did not truly comprehend the name of Fork’s illness—conversion hysteria. It meant that the patient sought complete satisfaction of his ego, causing the neurological system to become unbalanced. No matter how much reason and sincerity there was in Cubresly’s warning, it was meaningless to Fork. Like some tyrant of the ancient world, all he was interested in was an unqualified yes.

  “Excellency!”

  Cubresly’s aide, Captain Witty, cried out a warning mingled with a scream, just as a white flash of light shone out from Fork’s hand, silently penetrating the right side of the director of Joint Operational Headquarters.

  Admiral Cubresly stared back blankly and staggered as his firm, heavyset body lost its balance. Captain Witty caught him and kept him from falling.

  Commodore Fork was already pinned beneath the piled bodies of several sturdy security guards. The miniature blaster he had concealed in his sleeve had also been wrested away.

  “Call a doctor!” cried Witty. In the heat of his anger, he was even screaming at the guards. “You were slow! Why didn’t you grab him before he fired? You useless—! What do you think you’re here for!”

  The guards apologized; the captive Fork they knocked around more than was really necessary.

  Fork’s disheveled hair clung to his sweaty brow. Underneath it, he was staring fixedly into his own lost future, with eyes focused on nothing.

  When he heard the report, Admiral Bucock literally jumped up from his chair. He had never imagined that the sneak attack might come in such a form. The old admiral, of course, didn’t believe for a second that this was a single, isolated incident.

  “So, how is the director?”

  “He’s going to pull through, sir. However, they say he needs three months to make a full recovery and undisturbed bed rest for the time being.”

  “Oh well, I guess we should count our blessings,” Bucock murmured.

  He felt something akin to a nasty aftertaste. At the time of the Battle of Amritsar, he had been the one who had torn into Fork for his incompetence and irresponsibility, triggering his episode. If Fork’s intention had been to get even, the victim might very well have been Bucock instead of Cubresly.

  The news that Reserve Commodore Fork had assaulted and wounded Admiral Cubresly, director of Joint Operational Headquarters, sent a shock wave of horror across all of Planet Heinessen, then rode the FTL networks to every corner of the Free Planets Alliance.

  The incident was so embarrassing to the military that some even gave wistful voice to this perilous thought:

  “Were this the empire, we could ban coverage of this kind of thing.”

  The most pressing matter now was the need for a leader at Joint Operational Headquarters. Either an acting director or a successor for Cubresly had to be appointed.

  If the number one position among uniformed officers was director of Joint Operational Headquarters, then number two was commander in chief of the space armada.

  When the Defense Committee sounded out Bucock about taking on the duties of temporary acting director as well, he refused on the spot. To give the organization’s number one and number two positions to the same person would be to open up a path toward dictatorial powers. This was sound reasoning on the part of the elderly admiral, but inwardly, he also thought it necessary to keep these two targets for terrorist attacks well apart from one another.

  Bucock was not afraid of being targeted by terrorists. However, if he were to be assassinated after both offices had been unified in his person, then two huge organizations—the Alliance Armed Forces Space Armada and Joint Operational Headquarters—would both lose their chief and become paralyzed. If even one of those two were not up and running, the FPA’s entire military might lose its ability to function.

  In the end, the one chosen to be acting director was the eldest of the three deputy directors, one Admiral Dawson. When Bucock heard the news, he thought to himself: Maybe I should’ve taken the job after all.

  Dawson was not so much a serious man as a timid and nervous one. The positions he had held in his career included MP squad commander and Defense Committee Intelligence Bureau director, but back when he had served as the First Fleet’s Rear Service chief of staff, he had behaved like a petty bureaucrat, warning against the waste of foodstuffs, going around inspecting the dust chutes of every kitchen in every ship in the fleet, and driving the crews to distraction with announcements of things like how many dozen kilos of potatoes had been needlessly thrown away that week. He also had a reputation for holding on to personal grudges. One man who had excelled him at Officers’ Academy in terms of class ranking only had apparently been demoted for some kind of error and ended up under Dawson’s command—the story was he had tormented him endlessly over it.

  In any case, however, the appointment was settled.

  The next incident took place the following day.

  There was an accident at a ground base under the auspices of Capital Defense Command Headquarters. An aging interplanetary missile suddenly exploded as it was being inspected in the maintenance center.

  The cause had been inadequate insulation, which had allowed an electrical current from the propulsion system to flow into the fuse in the main body. This clearly implied a weakness in the weapons production system, but the thing that shocked the public was that the fourteen mechanics caught in the blast—all of whom died instantly—had been minors, all of them still in their teens.

  Had the human resource pool gone that dry?

  A chill ran through the citizenry. They understood the reason. It was because the war had gone on too long. Even within the armed forces, adults were disappearing from everywhere except the front line …

  Jessica Edwards, representing the antiwar faction in the National Assembly, expressed condolences to the victims’ families and, after criticizing the military’s lack of management skills, took society as a whole to task for continuing to make war.

  “What future can there be for a society that sacrifices on the altar of war the young men who should be shouldering its future? Can a society like that even be called sane? We must awaken from this mad dream and ask ourselves, What is the best, most realistic course for us now? And that question has only one answer. The answer is peace …”

  Bucock was watching the broadcast inside his office at Space Armada Command Headquarters. His aide, Lieutenant Commander Pfeifer, tsked his displeasure.

  “That woman just says anything she pleases, doesn’t she? She has no idea how hard we work. After all, if the empire were to invade, there’d be no antiwar peace activism and no freedom of speech either. She’s got a lot of nerve.”

  “No, what she’s saying is right,” the old admiral said, putting a lid on his aide’s outburst of emotionally skewed logic. “A society where the oldest people are the ones who die first is
one I’d say has its act together. It’s one where an old soldier like me lives on while the young boys die that’s screwed up somewhere. And if nobody’s there to point that out, the craziness’ll just keep getting worse and worse. Society needs people like her. Though I don’t think I’d want to marry a woman who was that good a speaker.”

  That last comment was the kind of joke Bucock often like to make.

  Bucock himself was in a kind of a funk lately that would have been unbearable if he didn’t crack a joke every now and then. Earlier that day, he had gone to pay his respects to the newly appointed acting director of Joint Operational Headquarters. Dawson, fourteen years Bucock’s junior, had blustered so much it was comical, telling Bucock in a voice louder than necessary things altogether unnecessary: “I expect even those with very long service records to respect order within the organization and to obey my commands.”

  Bucock had almost gotten cranky with him. If the old admiral had started talking about the possibility of a coup d’état and what measures should be taken to prevent it, the timid acting director might well have started foaming at the mouth.

  In the dim room, a conversation was being held in low voices.

  “Commodore Fork nearly assassinated Director Cubresly. The director’s going to pull through, however.”

  “Fork can talk a good game, but talk is all it is. He’s always been that way. Even during the fight at Amritsar …”

  In that voice was a complex weave of ridicule and disappointment. Muttered words of agreement rose up from all quarters.

  “But by seriously wounding the director, our goal of degrading Joint Operational HQ’s functionality has at least minimally been achieved. In that sense, Fork’s done rather well. Remember, abject failure was also very much a possibility.”

  “Still, I trust there’s no danger that he’ll talk about us? Things being the way they are, even the MPs could turn a blind eye toward the illegality of torture or make use of truth serums.”

  “They probably will. That’s no cause for alarm, though. He’s been subjected to very thorough deep-level suggestion treatment: Fork planned and executed the whole thing by himself. There were no orders or suggestions from anyone.”

  Because this was gratifying to Fork’s own self-righteous image of himself, it had been child’s play to make the man himself believe it, and the roots of that belief had sunk deep. Barring the use of some imaginary device that could plumb the deepest depths of the human consciousness—that could analyze and re-create a representational construct of it—there was no way to unravel the truth behind his actions.

  “Fork will live out the rest of his days as a madman in a mental hospital. It’s sad for him, but there are plenty of people worse off. We have a duty to save our homeland, to destroy the empire, and to execute justice throughout the universe. There’s no place here for sentiment.”

  The voice resounded solemnly, speaking almost as if its owner were trying to convince himself.

  “More important is what happens next. Although Director Cubresly lives, for the next two, three months, he may as well be dead as far as his life as a public official is concerned. As for his acting replacement, Dawson, it’s bizarre that a man like him would even make full admiral, and, clerical skills aside, the men have no confidence in him. For a while at least, Joint Operational Headquarters is going to be plagued with outbreaks of confusion … meaning that there’s no reason to delay execution. Make every preparation for D-day.”

  II

  That year, from the end of March through the middle of April, the thirteen billion citizens of the Free Planets Alliance did not lack for material to stir up fear and anxiety.

  March 30: Attempted assassination of Joint Operational Headquarters director Cubresly.

  April 3: Planet Neptis occupied by partial uprising of military forces stationed there.

  April 5: Armed revolt on Planet Kaffar.

  April 6: Large-scale civil war erupts in the Galactic Empire.

  April 8: Planet Palmerend occupied by rebel forces.

  April 10: Planet Shanpool placed under occupation by armed forces.

  From a place far removed from the capital of Heinessen, Yang was carefully observing these incidents.

  Although his predictions hadn’t encompassed the attempted assassination of Director Cubresly, everything else was unfolding pretty much as he had expected. Was it all right to congratulate himself for reading Marquis von Lohengramm’s hand this time?

  And yet from Reinhard’s standpoint, this was ultimately nothing more than a kind of preventive action; even if it failed, there would still be plenty of opportunity for regaining lost ground. To Reinhard, the importance of this scheme was probably down at the level of “no harm in trying.”

  And yet the whole Free Planets Alliance had been turned upside down because of it.

  Was Marquis von Lohengramm—as some claimed—a “grand master at moving his soldiers around the board”? Yang shrugged. That blond-haired kid had thrown the whole alliance into chaos without mobilizing so much as one soldier, hadn’t he?

  To say “I read your hand” after that would just feel hollow. Yang hadn’t been able to stop him, nor could he foresee how things would play out from here, aside from the likelihood of an attempted coup in the capital. Even Reinhard himself, author and director of this little drama, had probably not scripted the scenario any further than that point.

  Which meant that what happened from here on out would all depend on the abilities of the primary and supporting cast. In that case, thought Yang, who is it that’s playing the lead? Who’s the ringleader who’s going to pull the trigger on the coup? Guess we’ll know soon enough in any case, but I’m still awfully curious.

  On April 13, an FTL arrived from Heinessen bearing orders from Admiral Dawson.

  “Admiral Yang: Mobilize the Iserlohn Patrol Fleet, and with all possible haste quell the revolts on Neptis, Kaffar, Palmerend, and Shanpool,” he said.

  “In all four places?”

  Yang, unsurprisingly, was taken aback by this. He had expected a mobilization order to come down sooner or later but only for one site. He had been sure that the fleet at Heinessen would be mobilized to deal with the other three.

  Yang pressed his concern: “That’s going to empty out Iserlohn Fortress for quite some time. Are you all right with that?”

  “At present, the empire is in a state of full-scale civil war. The danger of them attacking Iserlohn with a large force is exceedingly small. What I ask of you, Commander Yang, is that you fulfill your duties as a soldier without worry or reservation.”

  I see now, Yang thought, impressed. So there really are people in the world who think this way, too—who get the cause and effect, the action and reaction, just magnificently backward. True, they have no idea what’s really going on, but still …

  This had gotten unexpectedly humorous. Admiral Dawson, acting director of Joint Operational Headquarters, had a reputation for mediocre tactical planning, and contrary to all expectation, that might mean he was just the sort of man who wouldn’t do exactly what Reinhard wanted.

  If a large regiment were left sitting in the capital, that would throw a wrench into the plan and cause problems for the conspirators. Unable to make their move even if they wanted to, their plan might never be put into action. Of course, even if they were thus obstructed, they’d probably try something else, but at least for the time being, they wouldn’t be able to strike with the fleet away and do as they pleased with an undefended capital.

  Of course, all of this had only just happened to turn out this way. Dawson’s intention was probably to work Yang and his subordinates to the bone. That much Yang had surmised, but what he couldn’t understand was the reason why Dawson was doing it. Though he had heard Dawson was not one to forget a personal grudge, Yang had never met the man in person; therefore, there was no way he could have possibly
slighted him.

  Yang’s question was answered by Julian. No one was tighter-lipped than that boy, so sometimes Yang would let him listen when he was thinking out loud, halfway talking to himself.

  When Julian heard Yang wondering aloud about Dawson’s motivation, he chuckled and said it was easy to explain.

  “How old is this Dawson fellow?”

  “Midforties, probably.”

  “And you’re thirty, Admiral, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, that finally happened.”

  “Then that explains it. You’re both full admirals, even though you’re that far apart in age. Unless you’re as old as Admiral Bucock, he’s going to envy you.”

  Yang scratched his head.

  “Is that it? I see. How careless of me.”

  Yang had no equal when it came to guessing the thoughts of an enemy on the battlefield, but Julian had just pointed out his blind spot.

  Over the course of the past year, Yang had rocketed to prominence, rising three ranks from commodore to full admiral. To the man himself, this was nothing but headache and hassle, but to others—particularly the type to whom rank and position were everything—he was doubtless an object of envy and jealousy.

  Those were the kinds of people who couldn’t recognize the existence of values that differed from their own, so there was no way they were going to believe that Yang’s wish was to retire from active duty as soon as possible, live off his pension, and write a book on history sometime before he died.

  If you’re the man they call Miracle Yang, let’s see you put all four insurrections down by yourself. If you succeed, that’s fine and dandy; if you fail, I can deal with you however I like. That was probably what Dawson was thinking.

  If I do fail, maybe they’ll let me retire, was Yang’s thought.

  It was just as that outrageous thought was occurring to Yang that Julian spoke again.